Infographic: LinkedIn Finds Men Best at Leveraging Social Networks

It's the battle of the sexes as it applies to social networking. Who is better at it, men or women? According to new data released by LinkedIn, the professional network valued in the billions because of its large user base and ability to leverage that audience to produce reports like these, men are better at social networking than women.

LinkedIn isn't saying that men are better at sticking to 140 characters when sending out tweets or that men remember to respond to Facebook messages with more frequency; it's saying that men are better able, at least on LinkedIn, to leverage their connections. "LinkedIn's infographic measures overall savviness of the sexes in specific industries by calculating the ratio of the connections that males have and the ratio of connections that females have," Scribbal explains.

Though men beat out women in leveraging their social networks overall, there are still some industries where the social networking savviness of females dominates that of men. LinkedIn has displayed the top five in the infographic below and the most surprising, perhaps, is ranching, a mostly male industry.

Infographics
are always a bit of a hodgepodge of statistics culled from a variety of
sources. Here, we sort through the clutter and pull out some of our
favorite facts and figures:

A savvy networker is defined in this infographic as a professional with a robust network of trusted business contacts who actively works toward creating new career opportunities for themselves and the people in their network.

According to data gathered by LinkedIn where savviness is measured a function of the ratio of connections that men have to connections that women have and the ratio of male members on LinkedIn to female members, men are most savvy in these five industries: medical practice, hospital and health care, cosmetics (even though it's a mostly-female industry), law enforcement and capital markets.

According to LinkedIn's data, women are most savvy in these five industries: alternative dispute resolution, tobacco, alternative medicine, ranching (even though it's a mostly-male industry) and international trade.

Five industries where both men and women have strong connections are media production, market research, individual and family services, dairy and paper and forest products.